louts. I regard high school sports as a drug far worse than marijuana, and it is the reason that

the average tennis champion, say, is a pathetic oaf.

Any objective study would find the quest for manliness essentially right-wing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic and fueled largely by a fear of women. It is also certainly philistine.

There is no book-hater like a Little League coach. But indeed all the creative arts are obnoxious to the manly ideal, because at their best the arts are pursued by uncompetitive and essentially solitary people. It makes it very hard for a creative youngster, for any boy who

expresses the desire to be alone seems to be saying that there is something wrong with him.

It ought to be clear by now that I have something of an objection to the way we turn

boys into men. It does not surprise me that when the President of the United States has his

customary weekend off he dresses like a cowboy—it is both a measure of his insecurity and

his willingness to please. In many ways, American culture does little more for a man than

prepare him for modeling clothes in the L. L. Bean catalogue. I take this as a personal insult

because for many years I found it impossible to admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer.

It was my guilty secret, because being a writer was incompatible with being a man. There are people who might deny this, but that is because the American writer, typically,

has been so at pains to prove his manliness that we have come to see literariness and manliness as mingled qualities. But first there was a fear that writing was not a manly profession—

indeed, not a profession at all. (The paradox in American letters is that it has always been

easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.) Growing up, I had thought of

sports as wasteful and humiliating, and the idea of manliness was a bore. My wanting to

become a writer was not a flight from that oppressive role-playing, but I quickly saw that it

was at odds with it. Everything in stereotyped manliness goes against the life of the mind.

The Hemingway personality is too tedious to go into here, and in any case his exertions are

Identity and Culture 135

well-known, but certainly it was not until this aberrant behavior was examined by feminists

in the 1960s that any male writer dared question the pugnacity in Hemingway's fiction. All

the bullfighting and arm wrestling and elephant shooting diminished Hemingway as a writer,

but it is consistent with a prevailing attitude in American writing: one cannot be a male writer

without first proving that one is a man.

It is normal in America for a man to be dismissive or even somewhat apologetic about

being a writer. Various factors make it easier. There is a heartiness about journalism that makes

it acceptable—journalism is the manliest form of American writing and, therefore, the profession the most independent-minded women seek (yes, it is an illusion, but that is my point).

Fiction-writing is equated with a kind of dispirited failure and is only manly when it produces

wealth—money is masculinity. So is drinking. Being a drunkard is another assertion, if misplaced, of manliness. The American male writer is traditionally proud of his heavy drinking.

But we are also a very literal-minded people. A man proves his manhood in America in oldfashioned ways. He kills lions, like Hemingway; or he hunts ducks, like Nathanael West; or